I have a situatione here. I have a person that is isntalling and will take care of the garden. I’ve installed one of your controllers, hoping it would make life easier for everyone. But when selecting a zone manually on the controller keypad, that zone only works for 3 minutes. Am I missing something? I’ve tried with the app and it works fine for the time I select the same zone, but the gardener can’t do it’s job properly with a 3 minute interval, and I’m not giving him my phone!

Hi, that won’t work. His phone is just that, “a phone”, in the old style sense of the word.
However, the essence of the question is: 3 minutes?! Really? I can’t start to see the why of such a limitation. Unfortunately this won’t work for us, unless there’s a way around it.

Hey Rui, unfortunately, 3 minutes is the run time when running zones manually from your controller. Rachio is mainly designed to be run using the internet through our cloud. Although, we do have backup memory, in case your internet goes out, that will run the last non-flex schedule.

We’ve created a way for users to share “Limited Access” with their irrigation professionals, but if the person you use doesn’t have a smartphone, that’s definitely a challenge. Another thing you might want to ask is if he has a computer or other WiFi connected device he could use. He could always login to our web app.

This won’t cut it. How is he supposed to take a computer with him just to activate the valves? He’s an old style guy as you understood already. I bet he’s cursing me for not going with the Hunter controller we had on the project…
But still on the same subject, why the 3 minutes? Manual operation should be just that, not timed. Or if timed (safety reasons maybe), at least a long enough timer, like 15 or 20 minutes. Is there a future FW update planned to circumvent this?

I’m not sure in what climate do you live, but 2 cents from me from Eastern Europe.

We have a lot of days when there is a sun without any clouds, and watering during daytime, not at early morning or at evening, is not a good idea at all. Water creates micro-lenses that allow sun to “burn up” everything in the garden.
Therefore, the best idea is to schedule watering to evening, night or morning time. Perhaps it’s not the time when gardener comes in.
Maybe it would be better to negotiate program with him, schedule it for night - we at our area have 50% electricity discount from 11pm to 7am so doing all things related to watering after 11pm is even cheaper - and after few weeks of trials, when he comes and can possibly review and add water manually if it’s not enough - came to good water schedule, that will not require any manual attention and BTW you will not need to pay him for the time he just starts program and waits for it to finish?

I know this, as we have exactly the same issue in Portugal. The real problem isn’t the watering itself, as this will happen as you say, in early morning or evening. Setting up the watering system is, as for fine tuning the nozzles will make it much harder for him. It’s a significant size garden (about 800m2) in a complex configuration, with a mix of grass, bush, trees, etc. so you can see his pain! I don’t understand the limitation, and nobody from Rachio actually seems to have an explanation. It was an unfortunate design decision, and an unfortunate purchase decision by me. I’ll likely sell the controller to someone who doesn’t mind this, and get something else. Thanks anyway for the message.